Had the decision been made for me? Without BJ's help, Wes and I were still short of a third person for our STR trip. Our chances of finding someone were not looking optimistic.

After my talk with BJ, I made it home with half a day of sunlight left to live. Sadly, there was a car parked in the driveway. A fancy Italian sports car with purple leather seats was far from anything dad drove or could afford to drive. Although he would have loved to have worked on such a beautiful piece of metal. It could have been one of BJ’s family cars, but that was unlikely. I had just seen her out in the woods earlier, so why would she send a car for me?

I knew whose car it was. Dad had warned me, but I forgot until just then. As I stood in the driveway looking over what must have been a stolen vehicle, I got a call from Wes. Answering the phone gave me a reason to avoid walking inside for a little longer.

“I found someone to go with us,” Wes said.

“Who?” I asked.

“You remember my cousin Russell?”

“No!”

“No? You don’t remember him?”

“No! He’s not coming with us,” I said.

Russell was Wesson’s older cousin, who had a more traditional satyr upbringing. When people talked about satyr stereotypes, Russell was the perfect example to justify them. He was perpetually on a wild streak, incessantly pursuing sexual encounters, and lacked a filter of any kind. I had only met him in person a few times before, but he made more than a lasting impression when he tried to bend my principal over the hood of a school bus. Don’t get me wrong, I laughed like everyone else when it happened. Even so, I couldn't fathom spending weeks with someone like Russell without all of us ending up in a jail cell.

“He’s supposed to be coming to town around the time we’d be heading to STR,” Wes continued.

“Wes, NO!” I answered definitively.

“He’s 44, and he could drive us to the festival, so we don’t have to take a bus or a plane,” Wes debated.

“Your cousin fucks everything with a heartbeat. And wasn’t he in jail a few months ago for public indecency?”

“We don’t wear pants, dude,” he tried to joke.

“It was for doing someone on a playground,” I added.

“Allegedly,” he said.

Wes was the one who told me about his cousin, so it was almost laughable for him to try to undo all the negative groundwork he laid.

“How is your mom ok with you going out of town with him but not me?” I asked, dumbfounded in disbelief.

I may have been bad luck, but Russell had no excuse. He made bad things happen all on his own.

“Because we’re family, and my cousin is cool,” Wesson said.

I sighed in exhaustion.

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“But hey, if you manage to get Bug Burner to help us out, we won’t need him,” Wes said.

“About that... BJ won’t help us.”

“I knew it,” he said in a way adjacent to saying I told you so.

I took a moment to look around the neighborhood and take a breath before I continued.

“I guess your cousin is better than no one.”

“Trust me, Pitch, it’ll be fine.”

Why’d I have to be accepted into the internship? Why did Russell have to be an option for STR? I was lucky to accomplish my goal of supporting my friends, but unlucky to face choosing between them. It might have been the best worst-case scenario.

When I hung up the phone, I knew I had procrastinated long enough outside. I had to go in, and I couldn’t use my summer dilemma to avoid it any longer.

Growing up, my dad did his best to shield me from the reality of my mother’s life. Before I was born, she and my father were kids barely out of high school when my mother got pregnant. They were at the beginning of their journey when I came along. From the age of 1 to 4, I remember we lived happily. We got by, no matter how tough life was.

As a child, I was oblivious to the everyday struggles my parents experienced. My youth and naivety prevented me from seeing beyond our cheerful expressions. When I turned five years old, I noticed our lives differed from everyone else. We didn’t have money, and we didn’t have magic.

Around that time, kids I went to school with started using magic. They had spells for simple things like tying shoes or keeping their lunchboxes cold. I came home one afternoon and asked mom if we could get one of those spells. Money was tight, but she said yes. A few days later, I had my first spell book.

Fast forward a few years later. I was seven years old when a similar scenario played out. I went to school and found that kids my age were using spells, but it was better magic, magic that made my jaw drop. They were flying, talking to animals, doing all sorts of cool shit, and I wanted to do the same.

When I got home that day, I asked mom if she could get me better spells, and like always, she said yes. I was still young and dumb. We didn’t have the money for magic like that, but Mom never let me see the struggle. My parents didn’t get me into the best school possible just to let me be the poor kid who couldn’t keep up.

My mother got me a new spell book.

It had stuff from all four fields of magic. Battle magic, practical magic, leisure magic, even showman’s magic. I went to school happy as a kid could be for the next few weeks. And then I came home one afternoon to find our front door was off the hinges. Police were taking Mom away in handcuffs.

It wasn’t until I turned 9 years old that I understood she had stolen the spell book. Actually, she stole the pages. Most spell books came with instructions for three spells at most, and they were often derivatives, so closely related, two of the three would be redundant. The book mom got me had at least a dozen different unrelated spells. Dad and I never found out how she stole so many, but in the end, she was caught.

My mother was eventually released, but she returned home a changed person. She was different, not only with my dad, but in general. Magic, although immensely captivating and enjoyable, wasn’t known to create addictive behaviors. It could make people lazy, for sure, but owning spells wasn’t something a person could get addicted to. However, my mother continued to steal spells, so she must have been addicted to something. It might have been a blind rush or the feeling of taking what she wanted, but she couldn’t stop.

She wouldn’t stop.

What made it worse was her justifying the act. She brought each stolen page home and gave them to me like presents. It happened too often to count. After being caught the first time, my mother had enough experience to get away with the act effortlessly again and again.

Dad kept all those stolen pages away from me. He didn’t know how to stop Mom any more than her parole officer, but he didn’t want me to get involved. Was it any surprise when he started keeping her away from me, too? I came home from school one day, and all my things were packed up in bags. We left before Mom came home from “work”.

They got divorced shortly after.

Dad couldn’t bring himself to turn Mom in, but he couldn’t be around her anymore. Even I understood the problem at that point. My father got full custody of me, we moved to a new town, and I started school as a new kid. That was all before I turned 10.

Over time, I gradually distanced myself further from Mom, only seeing her every couple of weeks.

Her car, her stolen car, was the one sitting in the driveway that afternoon. As I walked inside, I knew to expect an unwelcome reunion.